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Begin/Again: Marking Black Memories

Begin/Again (detail)

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Maya Freelon
About the Artist
Maya Freelon is an award-winning artist best known for her lively, colorful paper sculptures, made primarily from tissue paper. Her godmother, Maya Angelou, described her work as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being."

For the past decade, Freelon has experimented with familiar, inexpensive materials such as tissue paper and glue as part of her dedication to making “art that’s inclusive, art that’s accessible and art that builds bridges.” As the daughter of an architect father and jazz singing mother, she learned skill, focus, and wild improvisation, as well as art’s potential to make our everyday lives more joyful. She values venues and commissions that expose her work to large, diverse audiences, and believes an internet router is as deserving of artistic attention as a gallery wall.

In addition to museum exhibitions, she has produced work for Google and Cadillac, and the Smithsonian, as well as for hotels, healthcare facilities, and government embassies. Her art has a wide, popular appeal and been featured in Cosmopolitan Magazine, Ebony Magazine, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and Modern Luxury Magazine.
Artist's Website
About the Work
Freelon discovered her favorite medium of tissue paper monoprint by a happy accident. While she was an art student she lived with her grandmother, Frances J. Pierce, and one day came across some tissue paper tucked away in the basement. Influenced by her grandmother, who came from a family of sharecroppers ("who never got their fair share") and had been an elementary school teacher for thirty years, she never wasted anything. A water leak had caused the colors in the tissue paper to bleed.

"It was a metaphor for finding beauty in the simplest form, the fragility of life," reflects Freelon. It is also a way to honor her grandmother, who has been a constant source of inspiration and support, and whose favorite sayings often provide Freelon with the titles for her artwork.

Since that day, Freelon has mined the creative possibilities of tissue paper. It’s a choice guided by politics as well as aesthetics. When Freelon uses this humble material in the high art context of museums and galleries, she challenges paradigms of power and honors the creative potential of every member of a community. "I am because we are," she insists, and has worked with groups of people to create collaborative "tissue quilts" in homage to African American quilting bees. To create Begin/Again, Freelon started with vibrantly dyed tissue paper. While the tissue was still wet, it was pressed into an absorbent paper then spun on a pottery wheel, creating a visual vortex of braided colors.

From the Artist

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Welcome 18 plain 2020-08-29T00:39:36+00:00
Introduction
Memory runs like an aquifer beneath the works of the five artists in this exhibition, a storehouse for the life-giving substance that sustains and shapes the landscape of their artistic practice. Sometimes the water lies just below the surface; for Mark Bradford and Maya Freelon, the memories are of a mother, a beloved grandmother, and vibrant African American community traditions. Sometimes the water table is deep underground. Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Manuel Mendive draw on African cultural and spiritual traditions centuries old. Ivan Forde, looking to the Epic of Gilgamesh, reaches back millennia to tap into a wellspring of inspiration. All five artists mark memories in the sense of honoring them as well as literally manifesting them in their visual artworks. Bringing personal and shared memories to the surface, this work bears witness, confronts, replenishes, and sustains.
This exhibition is titled Begin/Again after a work in the Escalette Collection by Maya Freelon. At this time, when every day we face a wasteland and the possibility of substantive change seems to move further away, these two words are more important than ever. Memories—uncovered, examined, and offered in an act of faith that we can indeed move forward—allows us to Begin/Again.
Begin/Again: Marking Black Memories is curated by Lindsay Shen and Jessica Bocinski. Support is generously provided by the Ellingson Family, the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art, and Wilkinson College of Art, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Animation provided by Wilkinson College’s Ideation Lab students.

About this Exhibit
The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting quarantine closures have introduced previously unthinkable challenges to our daily lives. In the process of navigating our "new normal," we hope to continue to find ways of connecting people and sharing important ideas. The Escalette Collection of Art is thrilled to launch its first entirely virtual exhibition Begin/Again with this goal in mind. This digital platform has allowed us to share more about the artists, their work, and their ideas than would have been possible with a physical exhibition.
- Using links, videos, and call-out boxes, this virtual experience invites visitors to follow some of the strands of thought that each artist carefully wove into the fabric of their work.
- Most importantly, this digital format has allowed us to foreground the voices of the artists themselves. Through video interviews and extended quotations from essays, we see this virtual exhibit as a platform for these five artists to share their experiences and thoughts in their own words whenever possible.
- Lastly, our virtual exhibition allows you, the visitor, to participate in the ongoing dialogue surrounding these artists and their works. We encourage you to share your questions, thoughts, or memories using the comment bubble icon at the bottom of each page. These reflections can be as personal or academic, informal or formal as you’d like, and can take whatever form (whether short paragraph, poem, video, artwork, etc.) that best expresses your idea. [Please note that images and videos cannot be submitted through the comment feature, and must be emailed to bocinski@chapman.edu.]
To explore this exhibit, you are welcome to follow the set progression of pages using the buttons at the bottom of each page, or to determine your own path by clicking on whatever page you'd like using the Table of Contents (which appears when you hover over the three-line sandwich icon in the top left corner).